Two Tales of One Website: How Arbitrage Sites Manipulate Metrics Using Misleading Content Formats

Ad arbitrage is the practice of buying web traffic, then selling ad space on your website for more than you paid to acquire the user. It’s not a new practice, not by any means, but we’ve detected a new strategy used to keep it profitable.

Many doubt that arbitrage is still a lucrative strategy; take this poster on BlackHatWorld (a forum for marketers to share how they game the system to make $$$):

In short: yes they still do it. You need significant volume to make it work, and the tools have changed a little bit from days past, but it still is happening at a staggering scale. In this article, we focus on arbitrage which starts from native ads placements, aka sponsored content boxes.

If you’re not familiar with the term, you’re probably familiar with the look of these placements (highlighted red below):

When buying traffic from native ads providers with the intention of performing ad arbitrage, the key factors you have to optimize are:

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